#ql discourse

Let’s look at some facts. directors/producers Aof, X, Jojo, Fon, New, Ninew, Waa, Koo, Film, and Ark are all out (and I’m just saying that I’ve never been able to find info about P’Tha’s family life lol). In the past year we’ve had Memoir of Rati depicting resistance to historical homophobia, a bunch of gay theater kids in OFDO trying to put on a BL play, the trials of a pair of gay elementary teachers being affectionate in public on Love You Teacher, a full exploration of every legal right and responsibility involved in marriage equality through My Romance Scammer, multiple series depicting the corporate limits of queer support, and I haven’t even mentioned a Jojo show yet! Then this next year, they’ve got more GLs than ever before to add to all this discourse.

To act like queer experiences and rights are not baked into the very marrow of these shows and that the creatives and executives aren’t working hard to make that happen means you are ignoring so much clear evidence to the contrary. GMMTV is making very queer work, but they are allowing it to go far beyond the queer coming-of-age tragedies that queer narratives had been locked into for years and years, and BL/QL has been the key used to unlock that potential.

My knee-jerk reaction was not about the queerness in the shows or of the people involved. My fears have to do with what kinds of queerness are allowed to be expressed publicly and in performance. And this isn’t gmmtv’s fault but fans and sponsors are often timid to show their love to clockable effeminacy. DMD and CopyA have been the most forceful in pushing back against that, and we saw GMMTV explore possibilities with Diva Deva Mata (GIVE FLUKE A LEAD PART YESTERDAY!) Still, there seems to be a bigger hurdle to building excitement around more overtly effeminate performers.

When I hear actors told to treat BL as typical love stories, I wonder if it doesn’t limit the potential for actors to push into more effeminate places with their characters and performance; not a caricature of effeminacy, mind you, but characters who others might read as gay based on their body language or voice. Instead of the exceptions like PP Krit and Gun Atthaphan, could effeminate boys be a norm? Could we cheer for them, too, or does everyone need to be masc for us to care? On the other side, we could look at how (un)willing the GL industry has been to depict more butch characters so far—thank you 4 elements for giving us wlw who we can clock from a mile away, though! And then there’s the dearth of trans/tom/kathoey love stories in the genre.

Some people will want realistic representations of queer experiences--the anxiety of feeling other, the circumstantial closeting, the vibrant sex culture and the culture of sexual education that it helped build. They might want a mirror for their own life or an educational opportunity for audiences to understand queer lives better. Awesome!

Some people will want clear depictions of class and political struggles that impact queer lives. They might want QL media to serve as an impetus to further political action. Right on!

Some people might not find representation of irl struggles compelling but want to see queer characters in different genres that they've been previously barred from, as well as continuations of some styles that queer creators helped invent. They might want to see all the spaces and stories queer people can inhabit against societal attempts to restrict them, the world of possibility that inspires people. So cool!

Some people want the giddy feeling of watching queer folks stare into each others eyes, co-habitate, hold hands, kiss—in other words, fall in love. They might want stories that bring comfort to queer hearts, that offer a counterargument to demonizing narratives they might’ve encountered growing up and that persist in the world. They want sweet narratives that are especially easy to share with sensitive souls, younger people, and families. And a by-product of works accessible to broader audiences: they are especially effective at moving the political needle. Yippee!

Some people are looking for queer characters going through those deeply erotic feelings that come with doing the wrong thing in fiction, exploring power, submission, pain, deceit, and ultimately the queer pleasure in all of that scene work. They might want kinds of queer stories that touch on queer people's own lives and feelings of wrongness in fictional worlds where they can explore darkness and extremity without actually endangering themselves in the process. So hot!

Some people even adore the taste of ‘almosts’ and things unsaid. Sweet subtext! The relationships and feelings that can’t rise to confirmation. Perhaps they precede the knowledge of language that would help articulate it. These stories acknowledge a society that hasn’t tilled a field for queerness to blossom and fruit. The love didn’t change that fact, as they say, but it was still there. These viewers want to bear witness for those who could otherwise be excluded or forgotten. Lovely!

One of my own preoccupations is with the effeminate behavior and performances that QL allows (and hopefully more and more butchery in the future). A story can have all the elements of queerness, but I like to see bodies! Bodies moving in swishing patterns, both subtle and bold, gesturing with a little gender deviance, and voicing those queer vowels and sibilances. And I want to see them treated with the full breadth of possibility, from sincerity to irony, from compassion to hatred. I want worlds where queer expressions are everywhere.

But my prerogative does not have to be yours or that of the creators. There are myriad ways to access queer aesthetics in media. Art, fiction, and performance have a multifaceted relationship to ethics. Ascribing a singular strategy or purpose to their function will needlessly ignore the context of their creation, (historical and cultural), the possibilities of creative impulses, as well as the variety of audience needs and experiences.

I’ve decided only to include those who came out outside of announcements about dating within a fixed pairing. Fan-service and translation just makes veracity hard to parse. In alphabetical order.

Bever Patsapon (Fourever You, 21 Days Theory, Love Mechanics, Future, Absolute Zero) came out on instagram, captioning his Pride event photoset “our pride 🏳️‍🌈”

Daou Pittaya (The Wicked Game, Century of Love, Love in Translation) came out as part of the LGBT community

Jane Methika (formerly Ramida; Love Design) came out in a tv interview

Jeff Nathadej (Love Mechanics, Future, Night Dream) and Nat Thewphaingam aka Nat Thew (The Wicked Game, Laws of Attraction, To Sir with Love) officially announced they were dating

Lego Rapeepong thanked fans for being “accepting” at the LYKN concert, which many took as a coming out

Noeul Nuttarat described experiences being attracted to people of both genders in a Mirror Thailand interview

Pangjie Paphavari (Clairebell) came out on an instagram live

Singha Luangsuntorn, up-and-coming actress at gmmtv, captioned her tiktok “guilty #wlw”

Yada Narilya, a lakorn actress slated for a GL series, came out on a talk show

GMMTV is sending the artist who comes with an emphatic queer connection but is least threatened by Russia’s anti-LGBT+ policies. That action has the potential to rally and mobilize local audiences, if not directly for queer-friendly policy, for warm attitudes and financial investment toward queer stories, building a base for later political possibilities.

Boycott is not the only legitimate action. For it to be effective, you need to involve a sizable demographic of consumers and investors to participate. The NCAA threatening to exclude North Carolina (a US state heavily involved in both the economics and culture of sports) over the bathroom bill was a recent example of very effective protest through boycott. The Montgomery Bus boycotts in the Civil Rights movement were effective because so many of the bus users were black (and they organized community-run alternatives for those people to use in the meantime).

The Thai BL industry does not have that kind of power internationally, but, despite their small size, they have proven to be exceptional at another political strategy: mobilization. They have found a means to bring queerness to the forefront for people beyond the rainbow. There were boycotts during the American civil rights movement, but there were also sit-ins where blackness was pushed into white spaces that forbid it. And there was celebration, too! Think about all the US civil rights music or the anti-apartheid concerts during the late 80s (Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” at Wembley, my beloved). Countries have won their independence through song, and cultures have been banned from singing and dancing while under occupation because the emotional empowerment is seen as so threatening (Arirang in Korea under Japanese occupation comes to mind first due to BTS’s recent interpolation of it in “Body to Body,” speculated to reference the recent resistance to a martial law takeover). Concerts and media are a way to inspire interest, uplift those already invested in the political struggle at hand, and gather people together from disparate groups together in a coalition.

This isn't just a Phuwin problem, or a problem brought about by a single bl actor alone. There is a larger industry wide issue of how queer stories are approached and distributed and I think we need to get to the root of the issue instead of destroying this random actor who was relaying what he was told when he first started working in bl.

This is what I mean by bad faith, though. What mindset is that exactly? It’s not that you’re necessarily wrong, it’s that we simply don’t have the facts to support that interpretation. I’ve watched the whole interview, and he explains so little of the process beyond the initial statement. The mindset he uses for het stories could just as easily be: this is a character with feelings and a specific history in a story with themes and details that speak to how I need to act.

You just don’t know.

And I truly, from the bottom of my heart, don’t think this is a problem WE need to bring to his attention. WE are total strangers to him. WE are making a billion assumptions about him based on clips and interviews. If there’s an issue with how he’s approaching queer roles, I think WE can let his queer directors and acting coaches, who have been pioneering this genre and its queer agendas, help him out there. It is not OUR place as strangers or fans to reach out across the internet to criticize someone’s work, especially someone for whom US international fans are not even the target audience. Even if we’re being nice and constructive about it, WE are randos to this man.

Yes, I know and have pointed out myself that the claim comes from the Japanese BL manga discourse (where it's also been countered), but it's always satisfying to lay out the facts and have the truth be so abundantly clear.

People are just so ready to have a bad faith take on something like that. That goes double when it’s gmmtv. (See my post dismissing the big-badification of gmmtv.)

Really, this argument is not a new issue to any kind of civil rights discourse. It’s an issue of integration vs. separatism, but in this case as a matter of genre. James Baldwin, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, and Randi Fawaz are my touchstones when it comes to this kind of discourse, personally.

I was so beaten down and tired and exhausted by the inescapable trauma of being queer in western queer shows and films. The characters’ queerness was so often the reason for the horrible things they experienced. Yes, technically it was society’s response the characters’ queerness, but the thread of “if only you were normal, you could have a normal life” remained.

And while it’s important to many to see on screen the hurt and trauma and isolation and pain and otherness and abuse that they know to be part of their queer experience of life. It’s important to me to see queer stories where being queer does not contribute to the conflict of the show. Being queer is not the fault or flaw necessary to drive the plot.

I am queer, and that is a fundamental truth that is foundational to everything I do and everything I am. I’d like not to be reminded that much of society believes this is the reason for the bad things that happen in my life.